COLOMBIA IN CRISIS.

RAMPANT DEATH SQUADS HAVE CREATED HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF REFUGEES--TURNING COLOMBIA INTO A HUMAN DISASTER.

For Jose Moreno, his family of six, and his neighbors, life as refugees began suddenly in mid-July with the arrival of a group of armed men at their small village north of here.

"We are going to do a cleanup in this area, so it is best you go away for a time if you don't want to get hurt," Moreno remembers the masked strangers announcing.

Because members of a right-wing paramilitary death squad had killed 11 people in a nearby settlement just a few days earlier, the residents of the Morenos' village took the warning seriously. Leaving their animals and belongings behind, they fled across the border into Venezuela, beginning an odyssey that brought them to a makeshift camp in an open-air coliseum in Cucuta. Here they are officially classified as "internally displaced people" and have little prospect of ever returning home.

"We want to go back to our homes and our yucca and banana fields, but we are afraid the paras will kill us," says Luis Mariano, another resident of the area.

"And so here we are," he says, "without a peso to our name, without jobs or hope, depending on the charity of others and sleeping on the ground and waiting for someone to bring us our next meal."

As Colombia's long-standing civil conflict intensifies, the fighting is inflicting a major social crisis on a country that is already deeply fractured. Hundreds of thousands of civilians are being forcibly uprooted and turned into fearful, persecuted migrants. The vast majority are peasants caught in the crossfire between Marxist guerrillas and the right-wing paramilitary forces that seek to wipe them out.

Fernando Medellin, director of the Solidarity Network, a Colombian government agency that deals with refugees, estimates that fighting has displaced 1.5 million of Colombia's 40 million people since 1985. Human rights groups say half of these people have been made homeless since 1996, with their number expected to swell by at least 300,000 this year.

MISERY ON THE RISE

"Even more important than the total is the fact that the numbers are still increasing, not holding steady or declining," says Leila Lima, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees' delegate to Colombia.

The current political violence in Colombia dates to the mid-1960s, when the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, today the country's largest left-wing guerrilla organization, was formed from the remnants of earlier, failed Marxist insurgent movements. Today the group, known by its Spanish initials FARC, has more than 15,000 guerrillas fighting to install a Communist state and controls or operates freely in about 40 percent of Colombia's territory.

The paramilitary death squads, the largest of which is known as the Peasant Self-Defense Union, or AUC, emerged in the early 1980s. Initially, they were financed by ranchers and other wealthy businessmen who wished to protect themselves from the leftist rebels, but today both the paramilitaries and FARC make most of their money from drug trafficking and kidnappings.

In addition, there are also two smaller left-wing guerrilla groups, both of which tax the coca paste and heroin poppies grown and processed in areas they control. As a result, large parts of the Colombian countryside have become a bloody no-man's land, with the Colombian armed forces battling all three guerrilla groups, and the guerrilla groups in combat with both the army and paramilitary units.

International relief and aid agencies describe the plight of Colombia's displaced people as the largest human emergency in the Western Hemisphere. In sheer numbers of refugees, the problem is greater than in East Timor, Chechnya, or even Kosovo. But in contrast to those places, "here the phenomenon is silent and gradual, and so it is invisible in a certain way," Lima says.

CAUGHT IN CROSSFIRE

Unlike victims of those other conflicts, displaced people in Colombia are not readily distinguishable by their ethnicity, language, or religion. Instead, they are ordinary citizens who happen to stand in the way of the armed groups at war in this Texas-size South American country.

Colombia's displaced people have not been resettled in large groups, or provided for and protected by international relief organizations. Their own government has only belatedly acknowledged the extent of the problem. "For the most part, this is not a country of camps," says Rolin Wavre, chief delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Colombia.

No precise figures exist, but human rights groups estimate that more than half of the displaced were uprooted by right-wing paramilitary groups. Leftwing guerrilla groups are considered responsible for forcing out more than a third of them, while the Colombian military itself is blamed for uprooting almost 5 percent.

ON THE RUN

Colombia's crisis is so widespread that some people have been displaced more than once. In 1993, for instance, Roque Murcia, now 54, and his wife, Delia, fled from their farm near Turbo in the northwest after a heavily armed paramilitary unit accused residents of collaborating with the guerrillas.

"They came and said that we had better go away until further notice, because they didn't want to have to kill us," he recalls. "Since they had already killed some friends of mine, I did what they said."

Unable to find anyone to buy his property, Murcia abandoned his horses, mules, and 185 acres of fertile land, to which he still holds title. After a time in a camp in his native province, he fled to the other side of the country.

Here, he eventually found work as a laborer on the farms of others, scratching out a meager living, until the paramilitary forces showed up once more with the same message.

"Now here I am, living the same tragedy all over again," says Murcia. His wife, 53, was recently diagnosed with cancer, but has been unable to receive treatment. "I find myself more desperate than when I was displaced from Turbo."

As part of the relief effort the Colombian government has begun to mount, refugees like Murcia are entitled to a card that makes them eligible for free health care and other benefits. But after some people carrying the card were summarily executed at roadblocks by paramilitary or guerrilla units who suspected the refugees of supporting the enemy, many are understandably reluctant to apply for the cards.

Fear has also led many to flee camps where they might receive help, creating what one relief worker calls "belts of misery" around cities like Cucuta, or Medellin, or Cali. Even there, they are regularly hunted down and killed by one side or the other.

"These people are confused and drifting,' says the Reverend Gustavo Sanchez Ardila, a Roman Catholic priest whose parishioners were forced to flee the settlement of San Martin de Loba in August. "They have lost the only things they had, their homes and animals, and do not know what to do or where to go. It is the saddest thing I have ever seen."

RELATED ARTICLE: IS U.S. AID FIGHTING DRUGS OR BACKING DEATH SQUADS?

To reduce the flow of drugs into the United States, President Clinton and Congress are preparing to deliver a billion dollars or more in military aid to Colombia. But can those dollars do the job? Or will they simply create more casualties in a long-running civil war? (See Opinion, page 25.)

The Clinton administration and many in Congress believe Colombia's military needs U.S. support to combat that nation's drug dealers, who export 80 percent of the world's cocaine, including about one ton per day to the United States.

"This critical aid package will better enable the Colombians to join the United States in the fight against illegal drugs, while helping to insure continued democratic rule in the hemisphere," says U.S. Senator Paul Coverdell (R-Ga.).

Supporters of aid to Colombia's military say it will be combined with assistance for the nation's farmers to end their financial dependence on crops used to make cocaine.

But critics of the aid say it won't stop the drug trade, and it could find its way to right-wing death squads. Elements of the nation's army have been linked with these paramilitary organizations, which are major drug traffickers and have killed thousands of Colombian civilians.

The U.S. aid plan "is misguided," says Mary Diaz, executive director of the Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children. "We should instead support humanitarian assistance and development programs."

For more information on Colombia, visit our Web site at www.nytimes.com/upfront

LARRY ROHTER covers the Caribbean and Central America for The New York Times.